Angry cries split the air as the approaching horde reach’s our line of traps. I glance at my trusty Warmage companion, then back to the lines of acid, rock, blades and arrows that block the enemy advance. It isn’t working. The orcs keep on coming, despite the mounting pile of bodies they steadily walk towards us. Our traps are no longer sufficient to stop the horde.
“So, new plan?” I ask as I ready my trusty staff, energy sparkling and swirling around its tip. “What’s your bright idea this time?” Reiken turns to me with a grin and laughs as he raises his sword.
“Kill em all!”
Orcs Must Die 2 is the sequel to its previous incarnation, Orcs Must Die, created by Robot Entertainment. It is a third person tower defense game, which combines strategy with brute force and magic to create a fun, challenging and often crazy experience. Much like its predecessor, the sole goal of the game is to, as the title suggests, make orcs die. It will feel incredibly familiar to fans of the first game, which a large array of weaponry and traps to play with as well as a new character, the Sorceress.
The story continues as players take control of the war mage once again, but this time he is joined by a former enemy; the Sorceress who has fallen on hard times. The retired war mage faces orcs once more and finds himself facing evil head on, charging into it with a smile and a corny joke. It is this atmosphere that gives Orcs Must Die 2 a charm that is sometimes lost in the tower defense genre, and it is easy to fall in love with the hilarious antics of the two main characters as they argue and compete while slaying the orc menace together.
Cleaning the castle
Players must defeat waves of orcs, which appear from the nexus, and attempt to reach the open doors at the end. They can do this by directly engaging the orcs or through clever placement of traps, or a combination of both. Their is no direct need to co-operate in this endeavor until the orcs start to break through; you can choose to defend separate areas or combine your traps together in one for a stronger and tightly knit deployment.
Each set of waves is launched by the player after they have had a moment to choose which weaponry or traps they will carry, and then place upon the field. Playing as the Sorceress I had a lot of magical weaponry at my disposal, including elemental magic as well as several traditional weapons, like the crossbow, or bladestaff.
I quickly found that I enjoyed the transformation ring the most, changing orcs into chickens and watching them flap around was oddly hilarious especially when targeting one of the many flight enemies. I quickly discovered that chickens cannot fly.
To unlock weaponry, traps or accessories, a player must progress in both the campaign and level and earn skulls in either the campaign or endless modes. They then use these skulls to buy weaponry and traps, or to upgrade or customize their characters appearance. It’s a pretty fair and interactive system, and if you make the wrong choice you can reset your skull choices and pick something else.
I found the reset feature to be immensely useful; it had no cool down nor cost to using it although you could only do so on the main menu and between missions, so I was able to try out the various weaponry between each map.
The Challenge
The difficulty of the game ranges from fairly easy through to challenging. Players can set the difficulty they wish to attempt on Campaign mode or try to survive wave upon wave of orcs on Endless mode. The difficulty itself is not in completing the level or surviving, but in doing so with all of your nexus points intact to gain the most rewards so you can progress and unlock more traps and weaponry, which you then use upon the orc menace with great prejudice.
It sounds simple, but as myself and Reiken found out, it quickly becomes difficult to maintain a front line which will not allow a single orc through. We constantly found ourselves chasing down the smaller, rat like creatures who were able to outmaneuver us and reach the gates at the end.
A trap for all occasions
Traps are a huge focus of the gameplay in Orcs Must Die 2. The best way to play the game in my opinion is to experiment with the traps and try to create new and interesting ways to crush orcs. Ranging from traps that throw them into other traps, pits of fire and spikes, to spraying acid or arrows that rain down on the menace, there is always something you can try that is bound to make you smile.
Each of these can be upgraded by three levels and you can then pick a unique variant from one of two choices, which may make a trap fire faster, shoot further, or last longer.
Bring a friend
The excitement of Orcs Must Die 2 comes through in the multiplayer mode, although you will need to bring your own friend as the game currently does not support public matching. While the single player mode is great fun, this feature was much clamoured for when the first game came out, and the team at Robot Entertainment has delivered exceedingly well. I began my co-op story career as the Sorceress, armed with my trusty companion Reiken; together we began an adventure into orc destruction.
It began simply enough, one nexus point for the orcs to enter and one exit to defend. As the waves progressed chaos broke out as we realized to our dismay, one of Reiken‘s spring loaded traps was launching the orcs directly into the exit! We scrambled over there and had to defend it ourselves from the orcs that were now quite happily avoiding the masher we had created to destroy them.
Our traps steadily became more complex as the missions and waves progressed. Even in the first mission, we created a blender through which many orcs were crushed and smashed. Later however, as we moved through the Campaign, I began to rely heavily on the acidic trap and my own weaponry to hold back the hordes.
Team-work itself was not necessary for the most part; you can easily separate and do your own thing and we did so on a few of the maps, but for the better part of the game it was just more fun to stick together and combine our skills and traps to create a whirlwind of death.
When together, the two characters also argue, chat and talk about what is going on often this results in hilarious comments about the Sorceress’s age, the Warmage‘s intelligence and the horde’s incompetence.
The orcs themselves keep things interesting, commentating on their various deaths with several references. Admittedly the one that had us both in tears was when the orcs came to my line of acidic spray and railway tracks. Then suddenly as the minecart came towards them and the orcs had nowhere to go but into my acid, one of the orcs screamed ‘its game over man, game over!’ before they all died in a mixture of crushing and melting
This continued for several maps and I was lost in the moment with my friend as we devised new methods to stop those pesky orcs. So lost in fact that it came to one in the morning before I realized it; we had been playing for nearly three hours straight!
Always defending that tower
I love the tower defense genre. Some of my fondest gaming moments have been spent holding back an enemy from my base, town or homelands walls. My favorite in the genre has, up till this point always been Sol Survivor, but Orcs Must Die 2 is threatening to dethrone the king of my castle.
Orcs Must Die 2 captures the love that I have for tower defense’s strategy and planning, but mixes it with the blood-lust of a third person action game. This has been done before in the past by games such as Sanctum or Dungeon Defenders, but Orcs Must Die 2 captivated me because there is just something about it that pulls you in and makes you want to play more.
Perhaps its the innate fun of crushing chickens with my traps, but Orcs Must Die 2 just keeps you wanting to go back for more. It is an incredibly relaxing experience, for an action tower defense game, and it was great fun to unwind with a friend, just smash some orcs and create chaos together.
I have seen some comments about how Orcs Must Die 2 is too similar to the first game, and yet is that such a bad thing? The first game sold well and brought us the joy of violently smashing orcs. It has the formula correctly made, third person action and tower defense gameplay blended together smoothly. It just lacked multiplayer, and now with co-op in the game, have you really any excuse not to give Orcs Must Die 2 a try? Grab a friend and take a look, it is money well spent if you are looking for a game built entirely around having fun.
So, where else can Robot Entertainment take this wonderful game series for Orcs Must Die Three? The obvious answer is of course, to allow players to be the Warmage‘s teacher and to have yet more orcs to kill in three player co-op, or perhaps take it a step further and introduce another Mage and his Apprentice? Let us know what you think!
